A CGD note with Megan O'Donnell, accompanied by a blog looking at the private sector's record of involving women in innovation (car companies: awful, biomed: better). It is a shocking waste of talent that women are just 15% of listed inventors on patents worldwide. There are things we could do to make that better.

A CGD Working Paper with Ben Crisman. Governments buy about $9 trillion worth of goods and services a year, and their procurement policies are increasingly subject to international standards and institutional regulation including the WTO Plurilateral Agreement on Government Procurement, Open Government Partnership commitments and International Financial Institution procurement rules. These standards focus on transparency and open competition as key tools to improve outcomes. While there is some evidence on the impact of competition on prices in government procurement, there is less on the impact of specific procurement rules including transparency on competition or procurement outcomes. Using a database of World Bank financed contracts, we explore the impact of a relatively minor procurement rule governing advertising on competition using regression discontinuity design and matching methods. The rule does appear to have a small, positive impact on bidding levels, suggesting the potential for more significant and strongly enforced transparency initiatives to have a sizeable effect on procurement outcomes.

A CGD paper, with Ben Crisman, Sarah Dykstra and Megan O'Donnell. In 1996, Burkina Faso enacted legislation banning the practice of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C). Much of the qualitative literature surrounding FGM/C discounts the impact of legal change on what is considered a social/cultural issue. We use data from the Demographic and Health Surveys DHS(VI) in Burkina Faso to test for a discontinuous change in the likelihood of being cut in the year the law was passed. We ﬁnd robust evidence for a substantial drop in hazard rates in 1996 and investigate the heterogeneous impact of the law by region, religion, and ethnicity. Overall, we roughly estimate that over a ten year period the law averted the genital mutilation/cutting of approximately 237,591 women and girls. We qualify our ﬁndings recognizing that Burkina Faso is a special case with a long history of bottom-up and top-down approaches to eliminating the practice.

A policy memo for CGD on a law to help US multinationals combat inequality in the workplace overseas.

A number of countries worldwide have laws that specifically discriminate against women’s participation in the workforce, including bans on particular occupations, restrictions on opening bank accounts or taking jobs without a male family member’s authority, and restrictions on travel. Such discriminatory laws are associated with considerably lower female labor force participation and with negative consequences for economic growth and sustainable development. They also contradict globally accepted norms and values on gender equality in the workplace. The US legislation or executive action we propose would encourage US multinationals to mitigate the impact of local discriminatory legislation to the extent possible within the host country’s domestic laws by following a code of conduct regarding women’s employment, potentially limiting that obligation to the most discriminatory of countries. The proposed legislation is modeled on US anti-apartheid legislation (P.L. 99-440) that encouraged US firms to hire, train, and promote nonwhites in South Africa in the 1980s. Part of the legislation addresses the actions of the executive branch; this could also form a stand-alone executive order.

A chapter for CGD's White House and the World publication looking at US policies from trade through migration, investment and aid that could improve outcomes for women worldwide. Written with Sarah Dykstra.

The Financing for Development conference in Addis Ababa in July represents one of President Obama’s last major opportunities to secure his development legacy. This catchily titled CGD policy brief co-authored with Beth Schwanke offers 14 proposals for commitments the United States Government should consider advancing for the Conference on Financing for Development. [Bets in advance on a hit rate of 0.5/14].

A CGD Policy Working Paper. The total scale of incremental investment requirements in infrastructure in developing countries has been estimated at around USD 1 trillion a year, with a range of related studies suggesting numbers between $815 billion to $1.3 trillion. While all such numbers are open to considerable debate, and were not designed to measure the cost of delivering the specific SDG infrastructure targets, they suggest the likely scale of the financing challenge for an SDG agenda which includes universal coverage to adequate housing, water, sanitation, modern energy and communications technologies. The complexity of infrastructure finance in developing countries suggests that external private investment will remain a minor player in the financing of infrastructure for development. Nonetheless, reforms of development finance institutions and multilateral development banks alongside infrastructure pricing in recipient countries could considerably increase financial flows, and the Addis Financing Conference later this year could help provide the authorizing environment for such reforms.